This patch read "movie.nfo" or "moviefilename.nfo" file in the mediaportal movie screen if IMDB informations are not found in the Database. When you use "shares view" you will can now move a movie to another folder or another disk without lost all your informations. Same thing if you reinstall MP, you will keep all your movies informations.

Note that informations like Actors are in the IMDB screen and will be not loaded from the .nfo file, if you want them you will to use the IMDB MP database. Manage Actors from .NFO is a too big modification of MP. I hope that MP II will manage this files ;-)

So you must have in a folder :

film.mkv : The movie
film.jpg : The picture that MP will show
film.nfo : The informations that MP will show now

and/or for a folder

movie.nfo : The informations that MP will show now
folder.jpg : The picture that MP will show when you brows the folder

hi, to try it you must first patch the MP source code ant install your own build. After you must install the Moving picture plugin and use it to scan all your movies (this plugin make a very good job !). Then you must use jmcentire exe. It will extract all the moving picture database and generate the NFO/Pictures files. After this you can use the standard movie part of MP, it will read the NFO directly in the repertory and not in the database.

+ you can move a folder to a drive to another without lost informations
- you can't sort by year, genre, etc because there is not the information in the MP database

The NFO used here are the XBMC files ;-)

We use it now without problems with some of my friends, if some users find it usefull we could extend it to read others files. I see this patch as a advanced proof of concept. The better could be a info read plugin in MP 2.

technick
Bonjour!
Sorry for a silly question .
As I understood, the MovingPictures already has some algorithm to use nfo-files - there is a corresponding checkbox in Settings.
So, why do we need a special patch for this?

No problem, it's to use the XBMC standard NFO without MovingPictures (directly in the standard movie part of MP). There is also others way to generate NFO files (the xbmc forum is full of solutions). And also - because if you have a big list of movies MovingPictures is very slow, this patch don't care of the number of movies - because if someone give me his directory with his holidays movies for example I have directly the informations without make anything.

So, as I understood there are 2 reasons to use your solution:
- MovingPictures needs lot of time to import nfo files - so it will be not convinient in case of lot of movies; with you solution it will work faster; to apply it, you still must mark a corresponding checkbox in MovingPictures' Settings;
- your solution can be used even in MyVideo; since there is no corresponding checkbox "use nfo-files" in MyVideo's Configuration, the import nfo-files will be done transparently from users.

With this patch, if you have a .nfo in the folder of your movie you will see movies information in MP. You don't need to reinstall again and again the database. Informations are with the movie. Nothing else. NFO informations will be display in priority to the DB if you have twice.

(I use MovingPictures to generate NFO but I could use any another software, I don't need it)

Yes this is the type of functionality i have been looking for a long time in Mediaportal!!

I never personally browse or organize my own movie collection by actor, genre or year. But I have achieved this for others by smart use of directory structure, symbolic links, nfos's and a little simple scripting anyway.
(This method once implemented can also be used by any media-center even movie-genre "dumb" ones like Microsoft's vmc and 7mc etc. and is very fast).

So for me who is lazy and doesn't need the advanced functionality of moving pictures which requires maintaining/backing up a seperate Moving Pictures database (that can suffer from corruption, OS crashes etc.) on every single client which runs MP is overkill.

Ease of use/setup/maintenance/portability (especially for non-technical users) and the performance of browsing through my very large movie collection is paramount.

I simply want the movie description perhaps some actor info to display as i scroll down my movie list in the standard "my videos" area of MP.

It looks like this is exactly what i want.

Technik just two questions:

1) long ago when i used to use vmc i generated my nfo's using a different scraper that implemented the mymovies.xml structure which was used by the "videobrowser/mediabrowser" plugin for microsofts media centres.

I believe jmcentire's script does not follow the strict xbmc xml structure found here:

Does your patch follow the strict xbmc structure or the extended one used by jmcentire's script and moving pictures plugin?

The reason i want to know is that I'll either look online for a mymovies to xbmc xml converter or write my own and post it here if anyone wants it.
I don't want to have to run the moving pictures scraper as i already have my own custom edited nfo's and artwork in each movie directory.

2) I have never patched the MP code or installed my own build. I work as a programmer but mainly in java. Haven't touched C# or any MS programming language since uni. I'd like to learn how to do it though.

Do i need the dot.net programming suite?
There must be a forum or wikki instruction on how to do so?
Perhaps for the non-technical you could provide an already patched version for download/install to widen the test base?

Thanks for your answer, I will look to modify my patch to read your xml this weekend.
(Please can you update your post and put the NFO as attachment because one of the error is invalid caracter and I need the original file)

apache
I also been looking for a long time so I finish to try to make it myself

1/ I use the jmcentire structure but normaly my coding method don't care of that it don't know, it's adaptive.... normally.